Posted
by
timothyon Thursday March 13, 2014 @02:37PM
from the even-I-can-do-that-math dept.

SmartAboutThings writes "Up until today, I always had the impression that cloud storage was pretty expensive and I'm sure that many will agree with me. It's a good thing that some bright minds over at Google have the same impressions as they now have drastically discounted the monthly storage plans on Google Drive. The new monthly storage plans and their previous prices are as follows: $1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB.The 2 dollar plan per month means that the price for a gigabyte gets down to an incredibly low price of only two cents per month."

marked as funny but... yes. they will connect your face to your kids face, and add you to the network of people and relationships along with facial recognition, age and place. welcome to the panopticon, only $0.02 per GB.

So just encrypt it before you upload it. problem solved. If I were to use it, I would probably use it forarchiving. I would prefer rsync but for the average person it would probably be enough to just uploada zip file of last year's photos. It would be easy enough to encrypt it while you were zipping it.

Isn't that the problem? Now it doesn't take any human involved even caring about it to be detected, flagged, and investigated before hauling your children off to a gov't training camp^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H orphanage, and you in front of a judge.

Well, putting a Sally Mann photograph in my non-shared, non-public SkyDrive account was enough to have an FBI guy visit my house at night and ask to look through my laptop for child porn. Not as unpleasant as an actual prosecution, of course. But a nasty enough jolt, I assure you. And if a local DA felt like making my life miserable for some reason?

Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:

- I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google- Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit- Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do- ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time

Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

There are several problems with the whole "cloud" thing:

- I can buy a few terabytes of local storage for the same or less than paying Google- Google constantly changes things (features, terms of service, etc) and if you don't like it, tough shit- Encrypted or not, you have no control over your own data, they do- ISPs severely throttle upload speeds. Getting a few terabytes into the cloud will take a really long time

So...post a folder of pictures to your drive account, then go do something else for a couple of hours, because your internet is useless until Google's done hogging all of your bandwidth...funny, DropBox had this figured out right from the start, yet after over two years of customer complaints, Google still hasn't figured out how to implement this.

Eh? Can't you just throttle it at your router? How hard is that? Hand in your/. credentials plz...

Mom and Pop aint gonna be using Google Drive, so don't bother with that excuse... any Gen Y and beyond should know how to fiddle with a router.

On the contrary, I propose that Google Drive is squarely aimed at non-technical (or barely-technical) people more than it is aimed at network admins. Much like DropBox, it's advertised as easy-to use and universal, so it's very likely that Mom and / or Pop will be using it...then calling the grandkids when they appear to be 'losing the internet' at semi-random intervals.

Have fun talking them through setting up router-level throttling from halfway across the country...

It's not the application's responsibility to limit its upload. Your operating system and/or your router should take care of that.

But default settings is for no rate controls on the OS or router side...meaning that both the OS and the router expect applications to play nice and manage themselves, or be user-adjustable at the very least.

Can you name any other application used to upload large amounts of data that doesn't provide user-adjustable bandwidth settings? My FTP client does, my DropBox does, even my bittorrent client does...I don't know about Picasa or FB, cause I don't use them, so I'm honestly curious here...?

That is nonsense. Everyone has limited bandwidth for a fact. Be it 256Kb/s or 20Mb/s or whatever.

When an application starts to upload or download something and takes all your bandwidth all other activites which are depending on that bandwith come to a halt. That is certainly most visible in the case of upload as the upload bandwidth is usually lower than download.

That is the reason why applications/services which are usually used in the background (as in dropbox, ftp, torrenting clients etc) all have thrott

I can pickup a 1 TB drive right now for ~$60 which means I could afford 2 of them at Google's prices. Instead of 1 year of service I can expect 5 years out of a SATA drive typically. So if nothing goes wrong, I've saved myself $480, if something does go wrong with both drives, I've saved myself $360.

So, keep your backups at diverse locations, if you can. Personally, that's a lot of damn work to keep up, I've never managed to get the rsync processes setup to mirror from one end of the house to the other, let alone opening firewall ports and setting up an encrypted link to a remote location.

Ridiculously high is right.... 11 nines uptime works out to be less than a millisecond per year. At that level if you're going to need to specify allowable ping times.

In reality, Google only offers 99.9% per month (99% for "reduced availability", I'm not sure what these prices are for) and the value of the guarantee is pathetic: they credit (not even refund) you a maximum of half your bill that month if availability is =95%. They could be down a full day and only knock 25% of you bill next month. That ca

Cloud storage is another type of media with distinct advantages/disadvantages. Yes, that 1TB HDD is about $75, but items stored on a cloud service can be accessed anywhere, and there is less chance of a single drive failure taking your stuff with it. Of course, cloud drives are vulnerable to malware doing a delete (which likely can't be restored), so long term archival media is always needed, preferably offline items, or perhaps something like Amazon Glacier.

Do you carry your SATA drive around with you wherever you go and attach it to every computer you use?

Yeah, there's a portable SSD in my bag, with eSATA and USB. There's a couple of 64gb SD cards in there too.

It's smaller than my smartphone and a lot more sturdy. It sits in one of those little slots on the side. Never had a problem with it.

I've had enough of trusting companies like Google to always have a particular service available and to keep their snoots out of my stuff.

On the other hand, if a company that doesn't data mine, and encrypts all data and does not acquiesce to NSA requests, then we can do business. But not for free or cheap because of data mining. I don't like F2P. I don't want anything for free. I don't trust anything that's being offered to me for free or for cheap. It just means the true price is hidden and that's creepy.

I've had enough of trusting companies like Google to always have a particular service available and to keep their snoots out of my stuff.

I've got enough "stuff" going on in my life that trusting a company like Google to keep "forever" backups of things like my e-mail seems to be a whole lot more reliable than relying on myself to make proper timely backups.

Plus, if I had anything to hide, it could very well stay hidden, off or on cloud servers. The sheer volume of crap that isn't hidden should be enough to keep any snooping investigators busy for a long time - meaning, it will be costly for them to sift through my records looking for someth

I hope you encrypt everything on those drives, just in case your bag is lost or stolen. Of course if you are encrypting everything anyway why not just use Google Drive or whatever? Is it unlikely that even the NSA can crack a TrueCrypt container with a good password and perhaps a local keyfile, and if they can and are willing to put in the effort you have bigger problems.

I have a server and my brother-in-law has a server. 10Mbps pipes on either end (upload), offsite automated backup (basic software handles this) with built in redundancy (again, software creates an image of the main backup drive) for both of us. We'd both have to be robbed/have fires at the same time.

Works pretty damn well and the only costs are the drives themselves and a little bit of electricity.

The main use case is not for private data. Private data is likely to fit into their free plan. This is for businesses who are using google services already, and want to share a lot of data "in the cloud."

Certainly not ease of access across multiple devices in and out of your own network or away from your own storage. Certainly not for backup, without investing in your own off-site recovery method. Certainly not in terms of time spent caring for that solution.

Having a large virtual drive in the cloud would make my life easier, but certainly not cheaper.

I don't think it's cost effective for me yet, but there's certainly a lot of green checkmarks on the chart for their solution.

Damn straight. I'll remind myself that phones and tablets were never mean to watch movies or listen to music or share vacation photos or pull up a reference document when I'm on a job site. That's the kind of stuff I really should be carrying around a full laptop for.

Sure. But on the other hand, without extra effort that 1TB external is subject to the same hazards that the PC it's sitting next to is. Plus *I* have to monitor and replace that 1TB on a regular basis.

There's more to backup strategy that just "copy it to an external drive and hope".

And if you really, really, really needed to get the stuff quickly you can "upgrade" to a commercial, highspeed account (100Mbps uncapped is ~$200/mo) and upload everything quickly or - in the case of a failure - download it all back faster than they can write it to a HDD and mail it to you.

I've always been wondering why no Google-equivalent (or Facebook, or Twitter, or Amazon, for that matter) came out of Europe. Not every one is comfortable storing personal or business data on servers in the US.

And therin lies the problem, if a megacorp whose headquarters are in the US is given the choice between handing the data over to the US government (and hence breaking EU law but probablly not being punished for it since the EU government won't know it happened) or refusing to hand the data over and getting punished by the US governemnent for doing so which do you think they will choose?

A 4TB drive is under 200 USD from several vendors. That is only $.05/GB. So, at 0.24/yr. This is 5..10X more expensive than commercial off the shelf home drive space assuming you have to buy a new drive every 1-2 years. That time figure is pretty conservative.

So, yeah, you maybe cloud storage gives you some replication, and the syncing of that replication costs some amount of money for bandwidth. How much extra that reliability costs really depends on the data dynamics, though and isn't as easy to estimate.

Also, 5..10X more is just about the ratio of SSD storage to magnetic disks. SSD is considered "relatively expensive storage" by most people I know.

Do you think data you upload to a cloud storage provider lives on just one hard disk that is plugged into the wall and that's it?

While some data centers do rely on more consumer level hardware (vs enterprise)... to help make up for the inherent unreliability of consumer level drives, they will replicate the data across multiple HDDs, in multiple racks, and possibly across multiple datacenters... as well as monitor the underlying bits for bitrot and overall integrity... in addition to sometimes offering backup options of what has been stored.

And this aside from offering you 24/7 access to the data from anywhere in the world while keeping that HDD and the attached server running (and power consuming) and with a redundant power system available.

All of these things quickly add up in terms of cost... so yes, two cents/GB is quite inexpensive for cloud storage these days when compared to like offerings.

I have a 500GB external that 1GB at this point has cost me less than $0.01/Mo... I more recently got a 3TB on sale for $103 but I'm not sure I would use a cloud storage service for large amount of data just because of the time involved with transferring that much data.

let's say I buy a 2TB hard drive for $99 each month, after 5 months I have 10TB, and at the end of the year I would have 24TB. That's more than twice the storage space and i don't need to spend $99/mo to keep it.

Let's not forget the cost of the computer to plug these drives into. Also forgetting the management time for backups, and whatever offsite mechanism you're using for DR, whether it's just the price of gas to drive to a friend or family, the power at a second facility, safety deposit box, or whatever it is.

Nobody is saying that you can't do it for cheaper yourself, if you don't place much value on your time. Backing up 1TB at $.02/gb for one year costs $240. A 1TB external drive costs about $70, and we ne

But that means the price is $2 for 100 GB. That doesn't mean it's $0.02 for 1 GB, because that option doesn't exist. Otherwise, I'm sure people would opt to pay 20 cents a month for an extra 10 GB. When you go to the gas station and buy gas for $3 a gallon, that's the actual price, because you can buy any quantity of gas you want (within the limits of their supplies and minimum measurements), and pay $3 for a gallon, or less for a fraction of a gallon.

... but for a lot of people, moving the data to and from the storage is what's really going to be costly. It'll be interesting to see how much of that disk space ends up going unused when word gets around about how much users get clobbered with data overage charges by AT&T, et al trying to use the cheap disk space.

Sure your ISP may not be happy if over the course of a few days you upload a few hundred gigs to any provider like this... but after that's done, the bandwidth bill stays low as there isn't usually much churn.

In the case that the amount of data to be uploaded is even larger... some cloud providers have the option to simply mail hard drives directly to the datacenter to import the data directly.

$1.99 for 100GB (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1TB (previously $49.99), and $99.99 for 10TB.The 2 dollar plan per month means that the price for a gigabyte gets down to an incredibly low price of only two cents per month.

While it's true that the 2-dollar plan per month are $0.02 per month, the other plans are only $0.01 per month. Failing to mention this is bad math.

If you're looking for long-term archival storage, Amazon Glacier [amazon.com] is a pretty good deal at a $0.01/GB. I backed a few hundred GB's of data there and it's only costing me a few dollars/month. Restores will cost money, but if my house burns down and I lose my NAS + backups, I won't mind paying them a few hundred dollars to restore my data to a hard drive and ship it to me [amazon.com]. Does Google Drive provide a way to ship your data on a hard drive? It would take me days or weeks to download data over my currrent internet connection (assuming I don't hit my ISP's data cap)

This actually starts looking a lot better if you're near the TB+ mark. At 1TB, it costs the same as glacier ($0.01/GB) with no bandwidth charges and instant, sync access.

The restore data is a nice feature, but for a few hundred dollars you can almost certainly negotiate access to get your data back that quickly from someone (vs having someone else queue you up, copy to disk, and then ship). Most big cable operators have 100Mb connections now. I don't know this for a fact, but I have this suspicion that if I

I know it is a paid advertisement but still, those prices are NOT incredibly low, they are still significantly more than purchasing your drives and doing it yourself and they are supposedly getting the benefit of scale as well as the benefit of being able to mine and sell your data.

Just upload encrypted filesystem containers and go about your business.

Truecrypt containers are nice, but the downside is that the entire container has to be re-uploaded every time something inside it is changed. Good argument for having multiple small containers, but then it's a bit of a shell game figuring out where your data is...

If you're looking for file-by-file encryption, try AxCrypt [axantum.com]. It can bulk encrypt / decrypt files, apply strong encryption, and securely shreds the temporaries once you close up a file you opened for whatever reason. And it's also open source;)

But that NAS is likely sitting at your location, which means if it gets burned down by insane meth heads or swallowed by a sinkhole, you're good and screwed.

For my business, I use DFS that replicates our shared drives at all three locations, so I feel fairly confident that an almost up-to-date mirror of the data is being held at two other locations, all of which are separated by a lot of miles. Coupled with offsite backup, I feel the business data is secure.

At the moment my personal data is on Dropbox, with my absolutely confidential data in a Truecrypt container. Still, Dropbox is kind of expensive for the 7 or 8gb of data I'd like to store, so I will definitely be considering Google's offering. Since both work the same, at least for the PC versions, in that each computer has a full copy of the data, if Google goes offline or pulls the plug, I still have my multiple copies sitting around.

Dropbox still has one key feature that Google Drive can't figure out: incremental updates.
That means that small changes in big files do not require the entire file to be uploaded again. IN your case, a large Truecrypt continuer will change frequently (or parts thereof). Dropbox won't blink an eye when it does delta change updates. Google Drive will upload the WHOLE thing once again.
If you're using truecrypt, dropbox is your only practical choice.

The point of a google drive backup is to have an offsite backup. Now, I agree you could set up that machine at a friend's house (or familly member) and get the offsite backup with a little bit of network configuration.